Note--I had intended yesterday's post to be my last for a week or two until a powerful phone call, this morning, drew helpless fingers to the keyboard with...

That the congressional page sex scandal is boiling hot was evidenced, this morning, by C-SPAN’s second day of a Foleygate-themed call-in question on the cable channel’s Journal program.Today’s question:

Should Cardinal, er, Speaker Hastert resign?

Except for a few die-hard callers, the shock of a right wing Republican sexual predator in a congressional leadership position seemed, this morning, spread across a wide spectrum of America.As shock wanes, people, of course, will wants to know the truth, that elusive personal and public element Congressman Foley’s alleged substance rehabbers should and will seek if MAF54, indeed, has a substance abuse problem.But, this morning on C-SPAN, truth came in the form of a phone call from a woman in Atlanta, Georgia.Melanie Sloan from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, had, as the program's first guest, just been introduced when host Robb Harlston went to an impassioned caller who, while slightly off topic, set the stage for a truth that is, indeed, the white elephant in the room of any Foley discussion; America’s obsession with sex and, in Ms. Sloan’s response, Mr. Foley’s curious disappearance:

Robb Harlston--Atlanta, Georgia, on our line for independents, good morning.

Caller—Uh, good morning you guys.Actually, what’s very difficult for me is that when I was younger I was molested, uh, quite a few times by men that loved pornography.And, this country is full of pornography.It is so cool to want to see a woman’s naked body…And, for the civilized world and how, you know, we say we’re so evolved…And, that we’re such great people…And, you look all over the world there’s smut everywhere.What do we expect?Are we gonna blame a Democrat?Are we gonna blame a Republican?We’re gonna be biased…Support our idea, you know, our ideals of freedom?Freedom has nothing to do with exploiting women, paying them money...They don’t have a lot of money…Poor women that just so happen to be cute to be naked…And, it’s not cute, to um, on porn sites to, you know, push the limit of “Oh, I’m 18 so you can look at me.”It just causes men and women to want to look at younger and younger and younger.It basically boils down to porn.And, I’m tired of hearing political agendas of Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican…We’re all pretty sick and we need some help…

Robb—Melanie Sloan…

Melanie Sloan—Well, I don’t think this case, yet, shows, uh, anything to do with pornography.Uh, but one thing I think that the FBI really lost an opportunity here…Uh, the fact that they didn’t begin investigating until Sunday night when ABC started the story, uh, on Thursday [the news actually broke in the MSM at 3:02PM Friday September 29] night means that Mark Foley has had several days to destroy his hard drive on his private computer.I, for one, as a prosecutor, would have liked to have seen what was on that hard drive and what other kind of email that Mr. Foley had been sending.And, also, what kind of Internet sites he’d been visiting.

As many people have been saying online and off, cases like Mr. Foley’s do not come about in isolation like some germ in a Petrie dish.But, like a germ in a Petrie dish, cases of sexual predation on minors do require time for a predator to establish a hunting ground, nutrients like our porn and narcotic-drenched popular culture and some enabling care like silence or revulsion to grow and, sadly in more and more cases, flourish.In America, for the corporate elite feeding off unchecked marketing and consumerism, everything, to our eternal shame, has a price.In quiet moments, divorced from the frenzy of unregulated media, any responsible reflection upon America’s oversold political and entertainment glamsters uncovers the same deep well of unhappiness, addiction and confused self-worth.This point is the point of unity for left and right in America.Surely, all of us can stop the unchecked corporate rape of our children and ourselves with an infinity of market-tested means to absorb the last wispy remnants of our very souls.This is the back-story, no matter the vulgarity of the opposing spin, to Foleygate.

UPDATEStunningly, at 10:50 AM, this morning, as captured by BlogActive.com and reported by RawStory.com along with the always excellent news and comments at AmericaBlog, MAF54 signed into an AOL chat/instant text area.This more than suggests a yet undamaged hard drive to say nothing of a very liberal rehab center.

One More UpdateKentucky's 4th Congressional District freshman Republican Geoff Davis has, in two short years, uncovered the formerly deep pockets of Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff and Randy Cunningham.Is it any surprise that Mr. Davis along with Steve Chabot of Ohio took cash from newly disgraced Congressman and GOP money fixer Mark Foley?According to the Cincinnati Post:

Congressmen Steve Chabot and Geoff Davis are pledging to give up campaign contributions they have received from a fellow lawmaker who resigned in disgrace last week...Davis, who received $1,000 this year from Foley's committee...[will donate it] to charity.

Excuse me but I have a question."Did you accept money from Mr. Foley in previous years, Congressman Davis?"I only ask because you Rethuglican Congressmen do tend to talk out of four sides of your two-sided mouths on occasion...

From my just failed attempt to embed a new YouTube video, I'm finally understanding the techno-mumbo-jumbo emails ( Mark Cuban corporate intrigue,?) I've been getting from Blogger: I can't embed a YouTube video anymore and (I'll just assume without looking) my old video embed links no longer work.I feel sad Blogger and, no doubt, GoogleVideo feel so threatened by the very home-spun nature of YouTube.Sure, I've looked at GoogleVideo but that file sharing venue seems more professional than the backyark fence gossip quality of YouTube.The Google business model is too vast and too associated with free expression to become so suddenly Stalinist, or is it?My contacts with the people at Blogger have always been more than pleasant and I would hope they could revisit this pouty, short-sighted corporate decision.